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In the face of increasing political disenchantment, many Western governments have experimented, with innovations which aim to enhance the working and quality of democracy as well as increasing citizens' political awareness and understanding of political matters. This text is the most comprehensive account of these various democratic innovations. Written by an outstanding team of international experts it examines the theories behind these democratic innovations, how they have worked in practice and evaluates their success or failure. It explains experiments with new forms of democratic engagement such as: Direct Democracy Deliberative Democracy Co-Governance E-Democracy Drawing on a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and with a broad range of case studies, this is essential reading for all students of democratic theory and all those with an interest in how we might revitalise democracy and increase citizen involvement in the political process.

Direct democratic instruments are increasingly applied in many European countries. They are subject to an ongoing public—and often highly controversial—debate. The question of how direct democracy relates to equality, i.e. if direct democratic instruments have the potential to foster equality or if they lead to more inequality, is crucial in this debate. Research has struggled to come up with a general answer to this question with scholars assuming equality as well as inequality-promoting effects of direct democratic outputs. In this paper, we try to shed new light on this controversial debate and argue that the impact of direct democracy on equality essentially depends on the social and political context in which the decisions take place. In order to examine the impact of context factors on direct democratic outputs, we first analyze the influence of country-specific variables such as the level of equality and the age of democracy—applying large-N multilevel logistic regressions. Yet, these statistical analyses offer no clear results: the effects of the country-specific variables are rather blurry and hard to make meaning of. The result suggests that other factors than the ones we included in the regressions are decisive for the effect of direct democratic instruments on equality. Therefore, in a second step, we demonstrate how country-and case-specific variables such as social and political characteristics impact the outcomes of direct democracy, using the same-sex marriage referendums in Ireland and Slovenia in 2015 as examples. We conclude that context factors are too complex to be grasped in a large-N, statistical analysis. This means that to understand how context influences the effects of direct democratic instruments on equality, for now, one has to go beyond the lens of statistical analysis and look at the respective cases in great depth and detail.

Representation is a process of making, accepting, or rejecting representative claims (Disch, 2015; Saward, 2014). This groundbreaking insight challenged the standard assumption that representative democracy can be reduced to elections and activities of elected representatives (Pitkin, 1967). It broadened the scope of representative democracy to encompass representation activities beyond those authorized by elections, transformed our thinking and provided a new perspective, putting claims and their reception into the center. This paradigm shift erased the distinction between elected and non-elected representatives and disclosed the potential of non-elected actors’ claims to represent (Andeweg, 2003; Kuyper, 2016; Rosanvallon & Goldhammer, 2008; Saward, 2006, 2009; Van Biezen & Saward, 2008). In spite of this lively debate, we identify an important gap in the literature: while this paradigmatic shift inspired many authors, conceptual frameworks that can be applied for systematic empirical analysis of real-life cases are missing. In this article, we fill this gap and propose frameworks for assessing and validating a variety of real-life claims. Our study provides empirical substance to the ongoing theoretical debates, helping to translate the mainly theoretical ‘claim approach’ into empirical research tools. It helps to transform the conventional wisdom about what representation can (not) be and shines a new light on the potential future of (claims on) representation.

This article advances the argument that quality of democracy depends not only on the performance of democratic institutions but also on the dispositions of citizens. We make three contributions to the study of democratic quality. First, we develop a fine-grained, structured conceptualization of the three core dispositions (democratic commitments, political capacities, and political participation) that make up the citizen component of democratic quality. Second, we provide a more precise account of the notion of inter-component congruence or “fit” between the institutional and citizen components of democratic quality, distinguishing between static and dynamic forms of congruence. Third, drawing on cross-national data, we show the importance of taking levels of inter-dispositional consistency into account when measuring democratic quality.

Both citizens and political parties refer to novel participatory practices in the contemporary crisis of representative democracy. Survey data indicate a growing demand for such practices within the electorate, while political parties have also begun discussing them more frequently. However, previous studies on citizens’ attitudes and parties’ discourse on democratic innovations rarely speak to each other. It remains unclear whether citizens’ attitudes and parties’ discourse are congruent. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyses the extent to which political parties reflect citizens’ attitudes towards referendums and citizens’ deliberation in their manifestos. We cover 15 political parties in Germany and the UK. Our analysis uses party manifesto data between 2010 and 2024, and data from surveys conducted on national representative samples. Our findings reveal that political parties and citizens rarely have congruent approaches towards referendums and deliberative practices. People’s enthusiasm about referendums is hardly reflected in parties’ rhetoric, but the latter reacts gradually to the public appetite for deliberation. There are visible differences between opposition parties and those in government.

This article explores diverse views on both the current challenges and limits as well as the reforms and innovations of existing democracies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. First, it argues that socioeconomic inequality, new populism, new forms of communication, and globalization have stimulated a renewal of interest in analyzing the “frontiers of democracy.” Democracies have reacted with different innovations and reforms in order to meet these challenges. The authors trace the phases of respective research from studies on singular, standalone instances to normative as well as empirical work on participatory (direct democratic and deliberative) systems. Finally, they advocate for combining the conceptual approach of defining democracy by the fulfillment of democratic values with rigorous empirical evaluation of the contributions (old and new) that institutions and procedures provide in order to fulfill these values and meet the mentioned challenges.

The established notion of political representation is challenged on multiple accounts—theoretically, conceptually, and empirically. The contributions to this thematic issue explore the constructivist turn as the means for rethinking political representation today around the world. The articles included here seek to reconsider representation by theoretically and empirically reassessing how representation is conceptualized, claimed and performed—in Western and non-Western contexts. In recognition that democratic representation in Western countries is in a process of fundamental transformation and that non-Western countries no longer aim at replicating established Western models, we look for representation around the world—specifically in: Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, China, and India. This enables us to advance the study of representative democracy from a global perspective. We show the limits and gaps in the constructivist literature and the benefits of theory-driven empirical research. Finally, we provide conceptual tools and frameworks for the (comparative) study of claims of representation.

Despite the popularity of direct democracy in recent decades, research on the actual output effects of popular decision-making is rare. This is especially true with regard to equality, where there are at least three major research gaps: 1) a lack of cross-national analyses; 2) insufficient investigation of the differential effects of different direct democratic instruments on equality; and 3) a failure to distinguish between different aspects of equality, i.e., socioeconomic, legal and political equality. This article takes a first step to tackle these shortcomings by looking at all national referenda in European democracies between 1990 and 2015, differentiating between mandatory, bottom-up and top-down referenda. We find that a large majority of successful direct democratic bills—regardless of which instrument is employed—are not related to equality issues. Of the remaining ones, there are generally more successful pro-equality bills than contra-equality ones, but the differences are rather marginal. Mandatory referenda tend to produce pro-equality outputs, but no clear patterns emerge for bottom-up and top-down referenda. Our results offer interesting, preliminary insights to the current debate on direct democracy, pointing to the conclusion that popular decision-making via any type of direct democratic instrument is neither curse nor blessing with regard to equality. Instead, it is necessary to look at other factors such as context conditions or possible indirect effects in order to get a clearer picture of the impacts of direct democracy on equality.

There is consensus in quality-of-democracy research on the role of electoral participation, but what about participatory opportunities beyond elections? Non-electoral participatory opportunities have been neglected in most measurements. Recent indices, however, include these opportunities as indicators of democratic quality. Should non-electoral participatory opportunities be considered an essential component of democratic quality? To answer this question and to address the controversy, I examined three established approaches. On the basis of this examination, it became clear that a novel approach was necessary. By applying the recently emerging debate on ‘democratising’ the definition of democracy, I argue that the controversy among experts needs to be connected to citizens’ concepts. An approach that takes citizens’ concepts into account implies several conceptual as well as methodological challenges. The paper suggests some solutions.

In this paper we argue that the concept of democratic quality consists of two necessary, but independently insufficient, components. The first is an opportunity-structure component, which includes the institutional and structural opportunities that allow for democratic rule. The second is a citizen component, which refers to the ways in which citizens can and do breathe life into existing institutional opportunities for democratic rule. Based on work from political theory we show how different ontologies or models of democracy place different demands on citizens as much as they do on institutions. We demonstrate the need for quality-ofdemocracy research to engage with work in political behavior and political psychology, from which it has traditionally been disconnected. In doing so, we provide a parsimonious analytic framework for a theorydriven selection of indicators related to three key citizen dispositions: namely, democratic commitments, political capacities, and political participation. The paper ends with a brief discussion of important implications of our argument for the future study of democratic quality.